The doctoral dissertations of the former Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and Aalto University Schools of Technology (CHEM, ELEC, ENG, SCI) published in electronic format are available in the electronic publications archive of Aalto University - Aaltodoc.

Intermediate Language for Mobile Robots: A Link between the High-Level
Planner and Low-Level Services in Robots

Ilkka Kauppi

Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science in Technology to be
presented with due permission of the Department of Automation and
Systems Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology, for public
examination and debate in Auditorium AS1 at Helsinki University of
Technology (Espoo, Finland) on the 12th of December,
2003, at 12 noon.

Abstract

The development of service and field robotics has been rapid during the last
few decades. New versatile and affordable sensors are now available, and very
importantly, computing power has increased very fast. Several intelligent
features for robots have been presented. They include the use of artificial
intelligence (AI), laser range finders, speech recognition, and image
processing. This all has meant that robots can be seen more frequently in
ordinary environments, or even in homes.

Most development work has concentrated on a single or a few sophisticated
features in development projects, but even work to design control structures
for different levels in robot control has been done. Several languages for
industrial and mobile robots have been introduced since the first robot
language WAVE was developed in 1973. Tasks can be given to robots in these
languages, but their use is difficult and requires special skills of users.

In the future, robots will also be used in homes, and ordinary people should
be able to give tasks for robots to perform. This should be done descriptively
using natural language as in describing tasks to another person.

In this work an intermediate language for mobile robots (ILMR) has been
presented. It makes it easier to design a new task for a robot. ILMR is
intended for service and field robots and it acts as an intermediate link from
user, an intelligent planner or a human-robot interface to a robot's actions
and behaviours. The main principle in development work has been simplicity and
ease of use. Neither any deep knowledge of robotics nor good programming
skills are required when using ILMR. While easy to use, ILMR offers all the
required features that are needed to control today's specialised service and
field robots. These features contain sequential and concurrent task execution
and response to exceptions. ILMR also makes it easier to manage the
development of complicated software projects of service robots by creating
easy-to-use interfaces to all of several subsystems in robots.

It is possible for users to use ILMR to give direct commands or tasks to a
robot, but it is intended to be used with higher-level abstract languages,
such as sign language or even natural spoken language through a high level
planner. An action in ILMR can be given coarsely, i.e. in an abstract way, or
in detail. Due to this coarseness, ILMR is suitable to be used with
higher-level abstract languages and the set of elementary commands supports
directly the use of natural language. With ILMR no complicated models of
robots and the world are needed. Only a few measureable parameters for robots
are needed and a simple map of the environment is maintained.

ILMR has been implemented in two different kinds of robots, and its use and
performance has been studied with simulators and actual robots in a wide
variety of tests. The structure and operation of ILMR has proved to be useful
and several tasks have been carried out successfully using both test robots.